Principals and Other Schoolyard Bullies

by Nick Fonda

  As quickly as that, it was all over. Billy ran off, but as he ran by me, he spit at me and pushed me so that I fell down. Marhan, undaunted and unblemished, came off the ground as if nothing had ever happened. I was the one who burst into tears. Panpan found his glasses and with an arm around each of us walked us back to the house, trying to make us laugh. It wasn’t until we got inside that I saw that my grandfather had been cut and that there was a thin line of dark blood along the edge of his cheekbone.

  That was Saturday. It was six days later, on a Friday afternoon, that two policemen rang the bell. They were big and seemed to fill up the kitchen door. They wore black boots with thick, heavy soles. They carried guns in thick, heavy, black holsters so only a bit of the pistol butt showed. They wore dark blue jackets.

  They sat at the kitchen table, their dark hats on the table but their jackets on, and spent a long time talking to Panpan. My mother, her face grim, sat with them. Sometimes, she repeated what Panpan said. One of the policemen, his hands folded on the table in front of him, asked Panpan question after question. The other one wrote everything down on paper. Slowly my mother’s face relaxed. The policeman who had been writing put down his pad of paper and put his pen into a shirt pocket.

  A week after that came a lawyer’s letter demanding a huge sum of money for damages.

  We moved, less than a month later, to the fourth floor of a block on Simpson Street pretentiously called Golden Towers. The apartment was very nice and everything looked almost new, but it was small. It felt cramped and, of course, there was no yard to play in. We stayed there for the next five years, until my parents bought the house on Garrand Street. It had a lovely yard, but by that time we were no longer children and never played in it.

  “This it?” he asked holding out a plastic card. He wasn’t standing on his own, but leaning onto the reception desk. I could smell him now: stale smoke, alcohol, sweat—a sour, vile smell that made me want to put my hand on my nose and mouth.

  The health card is unmistakable with its bright sun shining from the top left corner. The hand holding it out—rough, cracked skin; dirty, broken nails—was unsteady. As I reached for it I looked towards him, searching out his eyes, silently daring him to meet my challenging stare. And if I said to him, “No, this isn’t the card,” how would those eyes, clouded by alcohol and preoccupied by pain, react?

  Or if I brushed my hand against the card and knocked it to the floor, how would the broken collar bone bend to pick it up?

  Or if I took the card and, like some practiced card shark, flung it brazenly to the other end of the lobby?

  I swiped the card, asked the perfunctory questions, directed the patient to the waiting room where four others sat nursing their own ailments with silent worry. There are nights when triage is difficult. Precedence is given to the more serious cases. A heart attack gets seen before a broken arm. An accident victim goes before an asthma attack.

  The last temptation was to place the folder marked William Wendell Webster, twenty-seven year old male with a suspected collarbone fracture and multiple abrasions, on the bottom of the small pile of folders, underneath the false croup, the flu, and the stomach cramps.

  In the end, I dropped the folder on top where Dr. Pirano saw it just a few minutes later and called Billy’s name.

  Judy arrived to start her shift and, at 11 pm, I walked out the door and into the cool night air. I breathed deeply through my nostrils and savoured the faint, crisp, clean breeze. There was no more of the sour smell.

  The Other Mulroney

  The words infuriated me so much that I snapped the radio off with much more force than necessary; I called the dog, jammed on my outdoor shoes and strode out the door. The air was heavy with humidity and the sky was a low, grey-white cloud, behind which I thought I could make out the sun striving to create some semblance of day. I realized that I should have taken my light jacket, if not my rain gear, but I was fuming inside and in no mood to be reasonable.

  In the valley, river fog—like this—sometimes rises thickly off the water in the early dawn. It’s a welcome sign for the day that follows will inevitably be warm and sunny.

  There’s a path that runs up the hill behind the house, through a small woods of birch and beech and maple. The hill is relatively steep in places, with unexpected outcrops of rock emerging from soil soft with centuries of fallen leaves. It runs up the escarpment for what’s probably close to a quarter mile and then opens onto a field that Craig Latulippe has left fallow again this year.

  The first years I had the dog, I would leash her on this walk, just as surely as when I took her along the road. Lara is part Lab. She’s an intelligent animal and fairly well trained; she’s not the sort of creature that would mindlessly wander onto a road that sometimes carries too many cars moving too fast. The zoning here is the same as in the village but along this stretch of road everyone is speeding up to, or slowing down from, highway speeds. What I did worry about was a cat sauntering out of a driveway, or a ground hog scurrying leglessly out of a ditch and across the road. It was too easy to imagine Lara running after some small but impossibly quick creature and impaling herself on the front bumper of an innocent car.

  In the woods, there was no danger of fatal collisions, but I always worried about a skunk or a porcupine attracting her attention. Now of course, she’s old and stays close by, hardly even inclined to bark back at the taunting chatter of red squirrels.

  The woods were wet with dew and I was soaked when we stepped into the breeze that was coming off the grassy field. I suddenly felt cold. Again, I wished I’d brought my rain gear, or my jacket.

  It was much brighter now that we were out of the woods and the sun was more noticeable, pushing a diffused but promising light across a large patch of sky. Lara made a half-hearted effort to bound into the tall grass, perhaps remembering that when she was young, it was here that I’d unleash her to run free. We turned upriver and walked along the edge of the woods, where we always walked when this field was planted in oats or corn.

  The words that had upset me a short while ago came back to me.

  “In retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight, Your Honour, I have to agree that I probably should have asked the question.”

  Were those his exact words? Did a man, bright enough to become Prime Minister, really say that he forgot to ask a question so obvious even a child would know enough to ask?

  Is that what had set me off this morning? Was it that wording? Words I imagined my Mulroney saying.

  LIKE EVERYONE ELSE ACROSS THE COUNTRY, I have not escaped coverage of the inquiry into our former Prime Minister’s business affairs. It was old news that prime ministerial hands had drawn unmarked envelopes stuffed with wads of large denomination bills across a tabletop between coffees and croissants.

  Nor could it have been his voice. His voice has always put me on guard. It is the voice of a con man, low-pitched, deep with insincerity, unctuous to the point of being greasy. It was a voice that would lull you to sleep and when you woke you would find your signature on the dotted line.

  Maybe it was something else, or perhaps a combination of things. When the realization hit me, I laughed aloud. Lara came back to me, her tail wagging but looking at me as if to say, “Are you ok?” I was ok, even though I was alone and laughing in Craig’s empty field. Lara knows I might occasionally talk to myself, or smile to myself when I’m at work, or in the kitchen, but I normally need human company around me to laugh aloud.

  “I’m fine. And you’re a wonderful dog for asking,” I said to Lara. I took her head in my hands and gave her a quick rub behind her ears. She looked up at me, her tongue lolling out of her mouth a little more than usual, her eyes dark and trusting. “Can you still fetch?” I stepped into the woods and found a stick.

  I met my Mulroney—Joseph, not Brian—on April 15, 1992. It was easy to imagine my Mulroney standing before a similar board of inquiry. He too would say, with the same arrogant, feigned innocence of his namesake, “In hindsi
ght, I probably should have asked the question.”

  I can cite the date of our first meeting with accuracy because it was my sixteenth birthday. Sixteen is considered one of those special birthdays, like twenty-one and thirty-five and fifty. For me, it was very special. I was alive and safe, when I could so easily have been dead or worse.

  I celebrated the day by enrolling in a new school.

  When I woke up that morning, for a long few seconds, I had no idea where I was. As I lay perfectly still, I could tell I was tucked snugly beneath warm bedclothes as if I hadn’t moved a muscle all night. My bed was warm and soft and as perfectly comfortable as it was unfamiliar. I was aware of light, of miniscule dust particles drifting idly upwards. It was a broad, soft beam emanating from a crack in the curtains on the wall to my right that gave the room a warm glow. The walls and ceiling I had never before seen and I could make no sense of them. Yet, like the half-light, they seemed welcoming, friendly. The space made me feel I was being cocooned and coddled and cradled. But for a long minute I had no idea where I was. Nor could I guess what time it was.

  The where finally came to me. Still, I lay in bed a few minutes more before getting up and going to the window. The floorboards were cold on my bare feet and the glass cold on my fingertips. I looked at my new surroundings under an almost impossibly bright sky: patches of dirty lawn between remaining mounds of sickly snow; mature, deciduous trees a hundred feet away fencing off the neighbour’s brick house. The sky was a bright, clear blue punctuated with white, cumulus clouds; a sky my painterly grandmother would teach me to refer to as Coburnesque. The sun seemed to suggest that it was late, which would make sense. The plane had landed after ten, and there had been customs and almost a three-hour drive after that. I had no memory of actually coming into this house, of putting on the strange pyjamas I wore. There was no sign of my clothes, but there was a blue housecoat hanging on the door.

  I found my mother and grandmother already up, my mother like me, barefoot and in pyjamas and housecoat which didn’t belong to her.

  My grandmother, as she always did, made a fuss over me, talking a mile a minute, asking me questions she never gave me time to answer, hugging me, kissing me, teasing me. And then she was off like a whirlwind to fix me something special for breakfast. My mom said happy birthday and then gave me a hug which seemed to last forever and I realized that she was crying. But I knew they were tears of joy, or rather, tears of relief and gratitude. I wasn’t a kid anymore and I knew that my parents had worried more for me than for themselves. The sense of peace I’d felt in the room upstairs still enveloped me and I didn’t have any tears to shed, but it felt good to have my mother hug me. I was filled with gratitude to be where I was.

  I met Joseph Mulroney towards the end of that same day and my gratitude, at least for a short while, evaporated. What I felt, the first time I saw Joseph Mulroney, was overwhelming fear. If I had seen him in the grey uniform of a Serb border guard, I’d have turned and run, or bowed my head, avoided all eye contact, and hoped that my mother would get me through alive and without too much pain as she had already and so recently done.

  I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, that first reaction.

  There was nothing about the man himself that should have set off all my alarm systems flashing danger signs. He was nondescript, like someone who might blandly have stepped out of the pages of a catalogue for men’s clothing.

  We had been waiting in the hallway for several minutes, staring at unpainted walls made of cinder blocks. There was nothing on the walls other than a few framed montages of smiling graduates from previous years. We had to stand and we were both tired. Eventually, his secretary appeared, led us a few steps down the hall to the next door, and we were in his office. As I followed my mother into the room, in the instant during which I saw Joseph Mulroney, he was in frozen motion behind his desk, bent slightly forward in the act of moving to take his chair. His head was cocked up, so that I saw his eyes staring malevolently up at me from below his eyebrows. His right hand seemed to be reaching back into his jacket pocket, or to his hip, as if for a weapon.

  He must have grunted something like, “Come in,” and sat down behind his wide desk without shaking my mother’s hand, even though she was reaching forward to shake his.

  “I understand you’re from out of province, or out of country? And you want to enroll your daughter to finish the school year?”

  “Yes,” said my mother.

  “April is a difficult time of the year to move to a new school. It’s very close to final exams. Now, before we start, we should make sure that your daughter can be admitted. There are language laws that impose restrictions on who can attend an English school. Were you, or your husband, educated in English in Canada?”

  “Yes,” said my mother. “We both were.”

  “Good,” he said and turned his eyes on me and asked, “Now, what grade were you in at your last school?”

  It took me a second to get my voice and it came out squeaky when I finally said, “I was in Lower 6.”

  “Suzanne was at Miss Wallace’s English School, a small private school in Sarajevo,” my mother explained. “It followed the Oxford and Cambridge curriculum. The children sit the O-Level and A-Level exams, as they would if they were attending school in England. Suzanne was preparing to sit five O-Levels, as well as her A-Level in Art.”

  “I’m not too familiar with that system. We follow the curriculum set by the Ministry in Quebec. I doubt at this point that we could even register Suzanne for the exams. And she couldn’t possibly be ready for them. She wouldn’t be able to catch up on the whole year’s work in six or seven weeks. But we could place her in Grade 11 just to finish the year. Or, we could put her in Grade 10 and it would give her a chance to make friends for next year.”

  “Oh?” My mother looked over at me and I didn’t know what to say.

  “I wasn’t really thinking of her being in high school next year. She was already looking at maybe starting art school in the fall, if she gets her A-Level. I haven’t yet made the arrangements, but I’m sure she can sit her Oxford and Cambridge exams; they can be taken almost anywhere in the world. Right now, I’m trying to get some normalcy back into her life. Suzanne’s going to be staying with her grandmother till the end of the school year. I’ll be there too, at least for some of the time. I want to get her enrolled in school because she’s just sixteen, and right now it would be best for her to be in school.”

  “Yes, of course,” but he didn’t sound too convinced. The momentary fear I’d experienced faded and gave way to a certainty that, for a reason I couldn’t explain, I was an annoying problem he didn’t want to deal with. He wasn’t in a position to shoot me or have me thrown into a dungeon, but his attitude towards me wasn’t much different; he wanted to be rid of me. “So, in effect, you’d like your daughter to audit classes till the end of the year. Is that correct? She’s not going to Cégep?”

  “No,” my mother replied. “At least, at this point, I wouldn’t think so. Her brothers did their studies in England and Suzanne was hoping to be accepted into Art School in Edinburgh.”

  Joseph Mulroney didn’t say anything for a moment. He seemed to be thinking something over, trying to reach some sort of decision.

  “I’d prefer my daughter be in this school,” my mother explained, “I know there’s a French high school fifteen or twenty minutes away. And Suzanne could go there. Her French is very adequate. She did three years of elementary school in French in Egypt, and she has spent a summer in France. But she’s been doing her schooling in English for the last five years and I think it will be easier for her to continue in English, if possible. Besides, her grandmother now lives just down the road, not even five minutes by car.”

  “Of course. We’ll be glad to have Suzanne here. So, you’re good in art? What else are you good in?”

  “I don’t know,” I finally mumbled, and my mother stepped in for me.

  “Overall, she’s a strong student.
Not many girls her age are already sitting an A-level.”

  “Do you like sports?”

  “A little, I guess.”

  “What sports did you do at your last school?”

  “Well, none, really.”

  “Miss Wallace’s was a very small school,” my mother explained. “I think there may have been thirty-five or forty pupils in all. It operated out of an old chateau on the outskirts of Sarajevo. There was no gymnasium and no Phys Ed program. I think all the school had was a ping-pong table.”

  “There were two tables.”

  “There’s something! Suzanne was very good at ping-pong.”

  “Mom!”

  “Last spring she won a championship.”

  “Good for you,” Mr. Mulroney forced what was supposed to be an encouraging smile. He was trying to be nice. I knew that, but on some visceral level, I didn’t like his smile as I didn’t like him. I knew I was safe, but I couldn’t help feeling that I was facing something evil.

  “I don’t want people to know,” I said. I was pouting, behaving childishly.

  “So you’ve never played volleyball or done any track and field? I think they’re still doing volleyball now and they finish the year with track.”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve never done track and field.”

  “Well, you’ll get a chance to try it here. I’ll speak to a couple of the teachers and we’ll have a schedule for you on Monday. Perhaps you could come in as well,” he said, turning to my mom. “There will be a few papers to fill out and sign.”

  “Thank you. What time would you like us here?”

  “How about 8:30? Did you say Sarajevo? Where the fighting broke out?”

  “Yes,” said my mother. “Good-bye for now.” She wasn’t going to elaborate. She acted as if the last week had never happened to us.